If you play for the Rolling Rocks, shouldn't you be wearing number 33????
OK, Army Grunt, what's the significance of the "33" on the Rolling Rock bottles. I always thought it was a drunk Army journalist who was trying to write -30- to end his story but in his stupor wrote "33" instead. Do you have another explanation?
Okay, Popeye, here's the tale which was verified by a friend who attended boarding school with one of the family:
"In hopes of coming up with something better I hunted up James L. Tito, who at one time was chief executive officer of Latrobe Brewing, the maker of Rolling Rock beer. Mr. Tito's family owned Latrobe from the end of Prohibition until the company was sold to an outfit in Connecticut in 1985. After some prompting, he told me the strange truth.
Based on some old notes and discussions with family members now dead, Mr. Tito believes that putting the 33 on the label was nothing more or less than an accident. It happened like this:
When the Titos decided to introduce the Rolling Rock brand around 1939, they couldn't agree on a slogan for the back of the bottle. Some favored a long one, some a short one. At length somebody came up with the 33-word beauty quoted above, and to indicate its modest length, scribbled a big "33" on it. More argument ensued, until finally somebody said, dadgummit, boys, let's just use this one and be done with it, and sent the 33-word version off to the bottle maker. Unfortunately, no one realized that the big 33 wasn't supposed to be part of the design until 50 jillion returnable bottles had been made up with the errant label painted permanently on their backsides. (I suppose this bespeaks a certain inattentiveness on the part of the Tito family, but I'm telling you the story as it was told to me.)
Given that it was the Depression, the Titos were in no position to throw out a lot of perfectly good bottles. So they decided to make the best of things by concocting a yarn about how the 33 stood for the year Prohibition was repealed."